Revision as of 09:13, 23 September 2009

Haskell has a diverse range of use commercially, from aerospace and defense, to finance, to web startups, hardware design firms and lawnmower manufacturers. This page collects resources on the industrial use of Haskell.

In February 2009 the Industrial Haskell Group was launched to support the needs of commercial users of the Haskell programming language.

Aetion is a defense contractor whose applications use artificial intelligence.
Rapidly changing priorities make it important to minimize the code impact of
changes, which suits Haskell well. Aetion has developed three main projects in
Haskell, all successful. Haskell's concise code was perhaps most important for
rewriting: it made it practicable to throw away old code occasionally. DSELs
allowed the AI to be specified very declaratively.

Amgen is a human therapeutics company in the biotechnology industry. Amgen pioneered the development of novel products based on advances in recombinant DNA and molecular biology and launched the biotechnology industry’s first blockbuster medicines.

Antiope Associates provides custom solutions for wireless communication
and networking problems. Our team has expertise in all aspects of
wireless system design, from the physical and protocol layers to complex
networked applications. Antiope Associates's relies on a number of
advanced techniques to ensure that the communication systems we design
are reliable and free from error. We use custom simulation tools
developed in Haskell, to model our hardware designs..

Anygma is a startup company focusing on generating easy-to-use tools for
creating audio-visual 2D/3D content, in the area of entertainment,
media, corporate communication and the internet. The company is closely
related to Nazooka, a niche player in the
media industry, specialized in creating cross media concepts and
communication solutions. Anygma is using Haskell to quickly build a
prototype of its new content creation platform, targeted towards artists

Barclays Capital's Quantitative Analytics group is using Haskell to
develop an embedded domain-specific functional language (called FPF)
which is used to specify exotic equity derivatives. These derivatives,
which are naturally best described in terms of mathematical functions,
and constructed compositionally, map well to being expressed in an
embedded functional language. This language is now regularly being used
by people who had no previous functional language experience.

Developing a modern integrated circuit (ASIC or FPGA) is an enormously
expensive process involving specification, modeling (to choose and fix the
architecture), design (to describe what will become silicon) and verification
(to ensure that it meets the specs), all before actually committing anything to
silicon (where the cost of a failure can be tens of millions of dollars).
Bluespec, Inc. is a three year-old company that provides language facilities,
methodologies, and tools for this purpose, within the framework of the IEEE
standard languages SystemVerilog and SystemC, but borrowing ideas heavily from
Term Rewriting Systems and functional programming languages like Haskell. In
this talk, after a brief technical overview to set the context, we will
describe our tactics and strategies, and the challenges we face, in introducing
declarative programming ideas into this field, both externally (convincing
customers about the value of these ideas) and internally (using Haskell for our
tool implementation).

GMAG, the quantitative modelling group at Credit Suisse, has been using Haskell
for various projects since the beginning of 2006, with the twin aims of
improving the productivity of modellers and making it easier for other people
within the bank to use GMAG models. Current projects include: Further work on
tools for checking, manipulating and transforming spreadsheets; a
domain-specific language embedded in Haskell for implementing reusable
components that can be compiled into various target forms (see the video presentation: Paradise, a DSEL for Derivatives Pricing).

Galois designs and develops high confidence software for critical applications.
Our innovative approach to software development provides high levels of
assurance, yet its scalability enables us to address the most complex problems.
We have successfully engineered projects under contract for corporations and
government clients in the demanding application areas of security, information
assurance and cryptography.

Designs, builds, and sells lawn mowers. We use quite a bit of Haskell, especially as a "glue language" for tying together data from different manufacturing-related systems. We also use it for some web apps that are deployed to our dealer network. There are also some uses for it doing sysadmin
automation, such as adding/removing people from LDAP servers and the like

ICS AG developed a simulation and testing tool which based on a DSL (Domain Specific Language). The DSL is used for the description of architecture and behavior of distributed system components (event/message based, reactive). The compiler was written in Haskell (with target language Ada). The test system is used in some industrial projects.

The rostering group at IVU Traffic Technologies AG has been using Haskell to check rosters for compliance with EC regulations.

Our implementation is based on an embedded DSL to combine the regulation’s single rules into a solver that not only decides on instances but, in the case of a faulty roster, finds an interpretation of the roster that is “favorable” in the sense that the error messages it entails are “helpful” in leading the dispatcher to the resolution of the issue at hand.

The solver is both reliable (due to strong static typing and referential transparency — we have not experienced a failure in three years) and efficient (due to constraint propagation, a custom search strategy, and lazy evaluation).

Our EC 561/2006 component is part of the IVU.crew software suite and as such is in wide-spread use all over Europe, both in planning and dispatch. So the next time you enter a regional bus, chances are that the driver’s roster was checked by Haskell.

Linspire, Inc. has used functional programming since its inception in 2001,
beginning with extensive use of O'Caml, with a steady shift to Haskell as its
implementations and libraries have matured. Hardware detection, software
packaging and CGI web page generation are all areas where we have used
functional programming extensively. Haskell's feature set lets us replace much
of our use of little languages (e.g., bash or awk) and two-level languages (C
or C++ bound to an interpreted language), allowing for faster development,
better code sharing and ultimately faster implementations. Above all, we value
static type checking for minimizing runtime errors in applications that run in
unknown environments and for wrapping legacy programs in strongly typed
functions to ensure that we pass valid arguments.

At Peerium, we're striving to bring a new level of quality and efficiency to online communication and collaboration within virtual communities, social networks, and business environments. We believe that a new environment that supports the effortless sharing of both information and software will enable a level of online cooperation far beyond current Web-based technologies -- modern programming techniques will enable the creation of more robust and more powerful programs within these environments. To this end, we're building a new software platform for direct, real-time communication and collaboration within graphically rich environments. Peerium is located in the heart of Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI), a multi-institutional organization, brings together multidisciplinary experts and advanced technological capabilities to address pressing research issues and to find solutions to complex problems that affect the quality of life in North Carolina, our nation and the world.

Research scientists at RENCI have used Haskell for a number of projects, including The Big Board.

Signali Corp is a new custom hardware design company. Our chief products
are custom IP cores targeted for embedded DSP and cryptographic
applications. Our specialty is the design and implementation of
computationally intensive, complex algorithms. The interfaces to each
core are modular and can be very efficiently modified for your specific
application. System-level integration and validation is crucial and is
the majority of investment in a product.

Clifford Beshers, David Fox and Jeremy Shaw have formed SeeReason
Partners, LLC. Our plan is to deliver services over the internet, using
Haskell to build our applications whenever possible. We have chosen
primary mathematics skills as our domain, seeking to create a social
networking site with games and activities that are both fun and
educational.

Tupil is a Dutch company that builds software for clients, written in Haskell. Tupil uses Haskell for the speed in development and resulting software quality. The company is founded by Chris Eidhof and Eelco Lempsink.

Jobs and recruitment

Consultants

Commercial Users of Functional Programming Workshop

The goal of CUFP is to build a community
for users of functional programming languages and technology, be they
using functional languages in their professional lives, in an open
source project (other than implementation of functional languages), as a
hobby, or any combination thereof. In short: anyone who uses functional
programming as a means, but not an end.